e-flux

It’s been five days since e-flux sent out their mailers giving art professionals early access to purchase .ART domains, and the registration process has been a disaster from start to finish. Many users were not able to access the .art site, which is run by UK Creative Ideas Limited (UKCI). The website described an abundance of demand for the reason, and e-flux sent out an email earlier today apologizing for the technical issues. This should not have been a problem. e-flux has a mailing list of close to 100,000 readers—a fraction of the traffic needed to pull down most websites. What happened?

No explanation was given in the mailer, but since that time, some of the bugs have been worked out. But now that users can get on the site, many have been shocked to learn that .ART domains cost $300 for the initial registration and $18.99 for the renewal—757 percent more than the comparable, .PHOTO which costs only $34.99 with a $34.99 renewal fee and 2900 percent more than .STUDIO, which costs only 9.99 with a 19.99 renewal fee.

Just how important is it for art professionals have access to .ART domains? The conceptual artists behind the collective e-flux believe it’s essential and have thus spent six years working on the project and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to secure management of the domain. Ultimately they lost the bid to UK Creative Ideas Limited (UKCI) in 2015, a set back that as of yesterday turned out to be only temporary. On Wednesday e-flux announced their collaboration with UKCI, to offer early access to the .ART domain to those who are signed up to e-flux mailing list. Starting February 8th and running through May 8th, e-flux will offer subscribers early access to the domain registration.

What is an artist’s role in activism? A panel at e-flux on Tuesday night explored the question many in the arts community have been wondering since Trump’s election a month ago.

The panel What Now: The Artist-Writer As Activist-Critic not only considered artist writing as a form of sociopolitical and institutional critique, but it also took a more expansive look at the intersection of art and activism. And this focus struck a nerve. Even on a rainy and miserable evening, the event space at e-flux was filled to capacity with over 70 people searching for a way forward in the forthcoming Trump administration.

Kick it off Monday night at Jersey City’s Word Bookstore, where the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research is inaugurating a lecture series about cyborgs. Or head to Manhattan’s Red Bull Studios for an event celebrating Grand Arts, the Kansas City project space that launched dozens of conceptual art projects and, now, a catalogue. Tuesday night, Paddy Johnson joins other art critics to talk shop at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Dweck Cultural Center, and Tyler Coburn talks genetic engineering and body mods as the future of humanity at e-flux. If you’re looking for something more hands-on (or a chance to move your feet), there’s a survey of handmade prints at Site:Brooklyn and an epic-looking disco fundraiser for El Museo del Bario Wednesday night. Thursday, White Box is opening a jam-packed group show (with some impressive names!) all about political angst. Friday we’ve got a talk from Maura Riley at Stony Brook Manhattan and Underdonk opening a class-conscious solo show by Patrice Renee Washington.

But the weekend brings us back to what we like the most: artwork that investigates the weird. Selena Gallery’s two person show from Dalia Amara and Florencia Escudero looks for uncanny surrogate female bodies in consumer goods on Saturday night. Sunday, Sascha Braunig’s work at MoMA will likely strike a similar chord. And MARC STRAUS opens a solo show by Chris Joneswho builds fantastical dioramas (pictured) from mundane images.

One of the first works you see in Martha Rosler’s exhibition If you can’t afford to live here, mo-o-ve!! is a dark and ominous portrait of Donald Trump. Leaning against a wall, the Trump tableau sits behind three glass bottles filled with urine. Is the piece a biting comment on Trump’s pissant Republican presidential campaign? Is it a playful but terrifying foreshadowing of his future official White House portrait?

Andrew Castrucci’s Untitled (Donald Trump) is neither. A quick glance at a nearby wall label confirms Castrucci’s Trump was painted in 1986. Created well before Trump’s presidential ambitions, Castrucci’s work instead critiques Trump as a reckless developer gobbling up large swaths of New York and Atlantic City real estate. As relevant then as it is now, Untitled (Donald Trump) reveals the uncanny confusion between the past and present that runs rampant throughout Rosler’s overstuffed exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Will the days of describing the internet as an ungentrified space finally be over? As the internet becomes an overcrowded domain space, ICANN’s new generic Top Level Domain (TLD) program is showing signs of an emerging virtual real estate boom—or at least that’s been the story for the last several years.

This is a good week for the arts. Wednesday night, head to e-flux for performances by Viktoria Naraxsa and a talk from Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Thursday night promises even more glamour, when Malik Gaines discusses disco legend Sylvester at The Artist’s Institute. Meanwhile, Olga Balema will be presenting her modified map pieces at the Swiss Institute.

Friday night, you’ll finally be glad for the G Train, with the all-day Theorizing the Web conference at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens followed by a night of openings in Brooklyn. Be sure to catch performances at the opening of Low Grade Euphoria by the Flushing Ave station, then continue to Gowanus for openings at Ortega y Gasset and Trestle Gallery. Saturday, the Cue Foundation will teach you the all-important skill of art handling, followed by an evening of unpacking a different type of baggage at Kimbery-Klark by Alex Ito and Masami Kubo. Sunday afternoon, hang with queer performance artists at Flux Factory for the latest installment of the do you: open source series.

Revisiting the ‘Simple Net Art Diagram’, reviewing an art fair’s virtual tour, calling out Georg Baselitz, breaking news on the USC MFA Class, and even bringing back nerdocracy. Readers, we truly feel a real sense of accomplishment for the stories we wrote in 2015, especially after amassing them in a ‘Best of’ list such as this. We not only paid artists to attend art fairs, but also investigated sexism is arts publishing and even had two Renaissance cosmetics experts dish on body hair removal. Who else publishes this shit? No one.

111 First Street, an OMA lower Manhattan building that will never be built. Image credit: Arch Daily

One of the worst casualties of the recession? Architecture. Here’s a look at 15 Rem Koolhaas/OMA designs that were never completed. Many of them are located in the NYC area, and certainly would’ve injected some of the classy eccentricism the city’s architecture was once known for back into the streetscape and skyline. [ArchDaily]

After losing thousands of works in Hurricane Sandy, Printed Matter has relocated to a bigger, flood-resistant space with the help of volunteers and donations from artists. [The New York Times]

This is totally click-baity, but this Toronto subway map from the future — 2021, to be precise, when the Eglinton Crosstown LRT finally opens — is pretty exciting. The new transit line will finally replace the bus service for a huge swath of the city’s uptown with rail transit, and hopefully bring Toronto’s public transport into the 21st century. [NOW Magazine]

More coverage of Tuesday’s protests at the Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. [Gothamist, Artsy]

Best reaction ever to Minneapolis rebranding its west downtown as “WeDo” (yup, “Wee-Doo”): “Honestly I love this city but naming your arts district “WeDo” is begging for poop and/or pot jokes.” [@AnaMarieCox]

Curators, according to Michael Govan, are cheap dates. At a contemporary art collecting panel this week at the Frick, the LACMA director advised collectors that they were more likely to get free advice from curators than art advisors. Take a curator for a lunch, collectors, and even buy them a piece for their museum’s collection, and “they’ll tell you their life story—they’ll tell you everything.” [Art Newspaper]

Why do conversations about censorship and “appropriateness” always center on other people’s children? An Illinois woman who sounds insane (she once tried to feed her husband to birds) has started a petition to remove a mural depicting a naked woman tied to a tree and a penis in a hot dog bun. Of course, her argument is “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” But really, what kid wouldn’t think a cartoon dick-in-a-bun was hilarious? [WISH-TV]

Saskatoon’s Remai Modern recently hosted “Supercommunity Live”, a two-day conference extending E-flux Journal’s Venice Biennale publishing project. But according to this recap by critic Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, it was just a bunch of people reading their papers, and seemed to only appeal to its visiting international crowd. [Canadian Art]

The Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG) just announced the winners of its annual OAAG awards, recognizing leading exhibitions by the province’s public art galleries. Winners include the Art Gallery of Ontario for its Suzy Lake retrospective, and the Art Gallery of York University’s historical archive-driven Is Toronto Burning? exhibition curated by Philip Monk. [OOAG]

Matthew Klos interviews Peter Drake, Dean at the New York Academy of Art, on the challenges and rewards of being a young artist in New York, art education, and contemporary painting. [Bmore Art]

.ART, the widely-contested Top Level Domain bid, was finally settled in a private ICANN auction, with both e-flux and DeviantArt losing out to UK Creative Arts Limited.

The news come as a blow to the two art organizations, who joined forces last year in the hopes of ensuring that the administration of the new .ART Domain would be an authentic Internet address for the arts community. Of the total 10 applicants, e-flux and DeviantArt were the only two who had applied for “community designation”, as there was expressed concern regarding the potential for the domain to be exploited by commercial interests.

Despite a widely distributed online campaign —including e-flux’s letter of endorsement from curators and artists worldwide as well as support from DeviantArt’s 31 million+ users — there had been internal debate in the art world with e-flux running the campaign at all.